Indian American Got 12 years Imprisonment for Web Drug Fraud

An Indian-American man, Rakesh Jyoti Saran (47), of Arlington in Texas has been ordered by a US court on December 11, 2009 to 12 years imprisonment and was asked to pay US$ 68 Million as compensation for his involvement in a complex Internet scam that carried a whopping US$ 200 Million by unlawfully selling addictive medicines to cyber customers and drug users.

Saran was the last accused in the Health Care Fraud and Rogue Internet Pharmacy Scheme case. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy for committing healthcare fraud and other offences, two counts of e-mail fraud and one count of conspiracy to distribute prohibited substances.

As per the plea papers filed in the court, Saran ran 23 Texas-incorporated pharmacies through two of his own firms - Infinity Services Group and Carrington Healthcare Systems.

The plea papers reveal that Saran's pharmacies bought expensive pharmaceuticals which involved psychiatric medications and addictive painkillers by falsely representing to the wholesalers that the drugs would be distributed to hospital, jails and other facilities.

The authorities claimed that the pharmacies distributed the drugs without doctor prescriptions to web customers, drug users and others who paid up almost four times the cost if the drugs had been acquired legally.

Saran used his pharmacies to run a "store front" website made to assist the distribution of controlled substances to web customers.

Moreover, Saran used his pharmacies to apply for pharmaceutical orders from other Internet Facilitation Centers (IFC) engaged in the unauthentic distribution of malicious drugs and controlled substances. Further, Saran played a major part in providing promethazine cough syrup with codeine, hydrocodone, and alprazolam to users who unlawfully sold these drugs "on the street", obtaining roughly US$ 20 Million in proceeds for doing so.

As part of his plea agreement, Saran forfeited assets bought from his unauthentic activities, which includes around US$ 1 Million in cash confiscated from his residence, more than US$ 375,000 in bank accounts; US$ 390,000 in cashier's checks and money orders and a custom home under manufacture which was sold by the US Marshals Service for US$ 1.2 Million.